Ruth Negga – ‘Imagine a Black Woman Just Wanting Something'

In Passing, Ruth Negga plays a character who dares you to disapprove of her choices.

- By Mallika Rao

IT’S A BRIGHT DAY in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting in a plush hotel lobby talking to the actress Ruth Negga about what it feels like to desire something you can’t have. At 40, she slots herself within a group of Black actresses who have perhaps had to “fight harder, wait longer, be more available” in order to clear a path for multidimensional roles. She feels she has sacrificed, missed weddings and funerals, put her personal life on hold. Then again, she counters, she still believes there’s “something exquisite” about longing— about not getting what you might think you want. She’s got an amused, faraway look in her eyes now, as if she has remembered an ancient joke about the nature of existence. “We do forget that, don’t we?” she says. “After a certain amount of money … you might become unfulfilled. Then you find yourself building penis-shaped rockets. And everyone, we’re looking at them going, So you’ve destroyed the earth and you’re having a big swinging mickey flash up in the fucking atmosphere. Great. Good for you. ”